A recent photo

Hieroglyph Project

edited by Ed Finn & Kathryn CramerHieroglyph is a publication, collective conversation and incubator for the “moonshot ecosystem” bringing together writers, scientists, engineers, technologists, industrialists and other creative, synoptic thinkers to collaborate on bold ideas in a protected space for creative play, science, and imagination.

"Bear with me as I unpack my indignation": Scientific American publishes an impassioned defense of science fiction

I strongly suspect that many of you who
scan this web site regularly are fans of science fiction. Personally, I
was a Heinlein kind of guy, though I made extensive forays into the
worlds of Herbert, Niven and Bear, and sampled the ABCs: Asimov,
Bester, Clarke. (Yes, I'm aware of Bradbury's work.)

I don't
read the genre much anymore. Still, if you're anything like me, you
screamed and stomped and pleaded with your girlfriend to understand the
error of the August installment of Blinded by Science, an otherwise fine column in Discover magazine. The author, Bruno Maddox, was nominated for a national magazine award this year, and I have well enjoyed some of his writings. His riff on twins was singular. (Individuality is a construction--it's funny because it's true!)

Unfortunately for me . . .
I must now heap punditocratic brickbats upon Maddox. For he has either
let the zeitgeist slip through his fingers, or he has gone quite mad
with power. Bear with me as I unpack my indignation.

Maddox spends a lot of wordage demolishing the importance of Michael Crichton as a writer. (Please see Nature editor Oliver Morton's essay on Michael Crichton published in The New Yorker in which Morton carefully and clearly points out how Crichton is distinctly and essentially not science fiction.)

But
Maddox's piece, despite its stated thesis, isn't really about the
relationship between science and science fiction. It's about a man
finding himself at the wrong party and feeling uncomfortable. Apparently, he was bored. Maddox says.

Then again, it could also be the other
thing--the thing that nobody's quite bringing up over the plastic cups
of Yellowtail Merlot. Which is that science fiction, the genre that lit
the way for a nervous mankind as it crept through the shadows of the
20th century, has suddenly and entirely ceased to matter.

Maddox did notice Charlie Brown's shirt, but if failed to convince him that we sf folk are prophets:

Other than this, however—the design on the back of the Hawaiian-cut
shirt of a very old man investigating the bean dip over at the buffet
table—this gathering of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of
America is palpably low on excitement. We’re on the 38th floor of a
Marriott hotel in Lower Manhattan, in a poky beige suite filled with
the same cheap, gestural furniture you find in those fake rooms that
get set fire to in fire-safety videos. And with the exception,
obviously, of this correspondent, we’re a fairly drab and subdued sort
of bunch. The demographic is middle-aged to old. The median shirt type
is sweat-. And there are several grown men apparently untroubled by the
fact that they’re wearing backpacks to a social event, yet troubled to
the point of madness and eczema by pretty much everything else.

Maddox seemed to desire a confession of our own obsolescence in the form of arguments about whether sf was old and boring. If that's Maddox was after, he went to the wrong place. Never mind that there have been innumerable sf convention panels since at least the 1960s on the possible death of sf. The right place to have found this discussion would have been the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts held in March.

John Clute at Readercon

SF critic John Clute has been arguing for a few years that it is basically over. My husband David Hartwell and others argue that it's not (though David edited an anthology, The Science Fiction Century, devoted to the proposition that science fiction was the characteristic literature of the 20th century). There is a certain amount of muttering that the reason Clute made this claim is that he finished the Science Fiction Encyclopedia in the mid-1990s and it would have to be revised and done again if sf wasn't dead, or become old and obsolete.

Pink Klingon at Marcon

But I suspect a chat with Clute -- who despises SFWA and the Nebulas as much as Maddox apparently does -- wasn't really what Maddox was after. Maddox was hoping for people dresses as Klingons. Again, he was in the wrong place. He should attend Marcon in Columbus, Ohio where -- if you go to the right party -- you can even find people undressed as Klingons.

John Cramer at Apollocon

I didn't go to the Nebulas this year. We stayed home and frantically cleaned house. If I want vigorous, intelligent conversation about sf and its relationship to science, I go to, say, Readercon, or the ICFA, or Boskone, or smaller conventions like Confluence in Pittsburgh or Apollocon in Houston.

Maddox asks, "Why are they not holding their annual meetings in some sort of gilded
purpose-built pyramid while humanity waits breathlessly outside to
receive their inklings into our future?" That's Hollywood, dear. We're book people, and not rich book people like the techno-thriller writers.

Minkel concludes that Maddox, not the sf folk he encountered, is the one stuck in the past:

I expect better from my lauded commentators.
You see, the world has not outpaced science fiction. Rather, science
fiction has outpaced Bruno Maddox. In the spirit of grand
prognostications, I hope at least it was a planned obsolescence.

Nonetheless, despite Maddox's unwarranted conclusions about the health of the genre, his description of a SFWA party is wickedly accurate. SFWA is a trade organization. The event is a business cocktail party. For the most part, people attend the Nebula weekend because they think it's a good business decision, not for the intellectual challenge and inspiration. I usually skip it.

I strongly suspect that many of you who
scan this web site regularly are fans of science fiction. Personally, I
was a Heinlein kind of guy, though I made extensive forays into the
worlds of Herbert, Niven and Bear, and sampled the ABCs: Asimov,
Bester, Clarke. (Yes, I'm aware of Bradbury's work.)

I don't
read the genre much anymore. Still, if you're anything like me, you
screamed and stomped and pleaded with your girlfriend to understand the
error of the August installment of Blinded by Science, an otherwise fine column in Discover magazine. The author, Bruno Maddox, was nominated for a national magazine award this year, and I have well enjoyed some of his writings. His riff on twins was singular. (Individuality is a construction--it's funny because it's true!)

Unfortunately for me . . .
I must now heap punditocratic brickbats upon Maddox. For he has either
let the zeitgeist slip through his fingers, or he has gone quite mad
with power. Bear with me as I unpack my indignation.

Maddox spends a lot of wordage demolishing the importance of Michael Crichton as a writer. (Please see Nature editor Oliver Morton's essay on Michael Crichton published in The New Yorker in which Morton carefully and clearly points out how Crichton is distinctly and essentially not science fiction.)

But
Maddox's piece, despite its stated thesis, isn't really about the
relationship between science and science fiction. It's about a man
finding himself at the wrong party and feeling uncomfortable. Apparently, he was bored. Maddox says.

Then again, it could also be the other
thing--the thing that nobody's quite bringing up over the plastic cups
of Yellowtail Merlot. Which is that science fiction, the genre that lit
the way for a nervous mankind as it crept through the shadows of the
20th century, has suddenly and entirely ceased to matter.

Maddox did notice Charlie Brown's shirt, but if failed to convince him that we sf folk are prophets:

Other than this, however—the design on the back of the Hawaiian-cut
shirt of a very old man investigating the bean dip over at the buffet
table—this gathering of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of
America is palpably low on excitement. We’re on the 38th floor of a
Marriott hotel in Lower Manhattan, in a poky beige suite filled with
the same cheap, gestural furniture you find in those fake rooms that
get set fire to in fire-safety videos. And with the exception,
obviously, of this correspondent, we’re a fairly drab and subdued sort
of bunch. The demographic is middle-aged to old. The median shirt type
is sweat-. And there are several grown men apparently untroubled by the
fact that they’re wearing backpacks to a social event, yet troubled to
the point of madness and eczema by pretty much everything else.

Maddox seemed to desire a confession of our own obsolescence in the form of arguments about whether sf was old and boring. If that's Maddox was after, he went to the wrong place. Never mind that there have been innumerable sf convention panels since at least the 1960s on the possible death of sf. The right place to have found this discussion would have been the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts held in March.

John Clute at Readercon

SF critic John Clute has been arguing for a few years that it is basically over. My husband David Hartwell and others argue that it's not (though David edited an anthology, The Science Fiction Century, devoted to the proposition that science fiction was the characteristic literature of the 20th century). There is a certain amount of muttering that the reason Clute made this claim is that he finished the Science Fiction Encyclopedia in the mid-1990s and it would have to be revised and done again if sf wasn't dead, or become old and obsolete.

Pink Klingon at Marcon

But I suspect a chat with Clute -- who despises SFWA and the Nebulas as much as Maddox apparently does -- wasn't really what Maddox was after. Maddox was hoping for people dresses as Klingons. Again, he was in the wrong place. He should attend Marcon in Columbus, Ohio where -- if you go to the right party -- you can even find people undressed as Klingons.

John Cramer at Apollocon

I didn't go to the Nebulas this year. We stayed home and frantically cleaned house. If I want vigorous, intelligent conversation about sf and its relationship to science, I go to, say, Readercon, or the ICFA, or Boskone, or smaller conventions like Confluence in Pittsburgh or Apollocon in Houston.

Maddox asks, "Why are they not holding their annual meetings in some sort of gilded
purpose-built pyramid while humanity waits breathlessly outside to
receive their inklings into our future?" That's Hollywood, dear. We're book people, and not rich book people like the techno-thriller writers.

Minkel concludes that Maddox, not the sf folk he encountered, is the one stuck in the past:

I expect better from my lauded commentators.
You see, the world has not outpaced science fiction. Rather, science
fiction has outpaced Bruno Maddox. In the spirit of grand
prognostications, I hope at least it was a planned obsolescence.

Nonetheless, despite Maddox's unwarranted conclusions about the health of the genre, his description of a SFWA party is wickedly accurate. SFWA is a trade organization. The event is a business cocktail party. For the most part, people attend the Nebula weekend because they think it's a good business decision, not for the intellectual challenge and inspiration. I usually skip it.

Mapping for the masses : Nature Commentary: Mapping disaster zones
Google Earth software proved effective during relief efforts in New Orleans and Pakistan, say Illah Nourbakhsh and colleagues. Is there more to be gained than lost from opening up disaster operations to the wider public?
doi:10.1038/439787a